


By Bone Adorned

by twixt_haw_and_thorne



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Bittersweet Ending, Blood Magic, Blood and Violence, Explicit Sexual Content, Fluff and Angst, Grief/Mourning, Human/Monster Romance, Humans vs. Beasts, Hunters & Hunting, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Recovery, Rough Sex, Shapeshifting, Summoning, Temporary Character Death, gothic horror
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 07:47:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29930214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twixt_haw_and_thorne/pseuds/twixt_haw_and_thorne
Summary: Claude is an anthropologist by trade, but a cryptozoologist merely by ‘hobby’. And yet in secret he claws his way with a passionate ambition, obsession towards some clandestine goal that no one can guess. Without warning, he hires a team of protectors, sells everything but the clothes on his back to pay them, and sets off for the north to a wicked forest to find the King of Beasts, a legend described only as an immense golden creature with a single blue eye. During the ensuing blizzard, he gets separated from his handlers, managing only to survive by following a strange lantern deep into the thorns, wherein he discovers a cabin where a lonely woodcutter with one blue eye welcomes him inside...
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Claude von Riegan, Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier, Hapi/Edelgard von Hresvelg, Minor or Background Relationship(s), minor - Relationship
Comments: 11
Kudos: 29
Collections: Dimiclaude Big Bang 2020





	1. Thorn

**Author's Note:**

> This is my piece for the Dimiclaude Big Bang! I am so proud and excited to finally release it after these past few months of work! Please enjoy the fic and the WONDERFUL art by @artoftangmo and @summahsunbirb on twitter! (There's also two more pieces by them coming, but they have minor spoilers, so you have to wait!)
> 
> If you enjoy the fic, please consider following me for updates and sometimes art at @Mechanist_Macha

_**Prologue** _

There wasn’t a meaning behind being _lost_ to a man like Claude. If one had nowhere in particular to be on a non-existent schedule, how could one be lost? Nevertheless, he _was_ lost. He’d never counted on how much color would factor into his ability to memorize landmarks as actual points on a map but everything was drenched in the bleakness of white bone, bleached as the sharpened spine of trees that pierced the snow in roughshod figures. Perhaps the pines were once green, perhaps the ground was once _earth,_ but he had taken too many heavy-booted strides towards the intimacy of the forest’s closeness and away from where they had staked tightly down two red tents in hopes the color would strike vibrancy against a blizzard’s whitewashing.

It did not. He saw no red. Claude was _lost._

But he was not afraid. No. Just as he could not be truly lost, he could not be afraid, because there were only so many reasons for such a thing and he just didn’t possess them. He didn’t have close family or friends to be concerned with leaving behind to the care of grieving, nor did he have precious possessions that someone might meddle with. And if he was being honest, while he valued the activities with which he filled his life, he did not value the _act_ of living intrinsically. Not to the point where he could truly shy away from the edge of oblivion.

Nothing lost. Nothing feared. No blizzard could distract him from his _reason_ for venturing into such a storm. And even if he could hear his paid company calling out for him, he’d ignore it. He didn’t need to be rooted to them. They wouldn’t be here if not for the promise of his money, a passionless promise that he had every intention of following through with if only so he’d never have to bother with their complaints. He was sure he’d find the tents when the storm subsided, but not even the infamous Faerghus freeze would keep him from exploring what he’d found.

The only hue that glinted in his eye, a light that strained the confines of a lantern (and yet no lantern was sighted), had puppeted him into the trees, where there was only minimal shelter from the dousing of heaven’s cold. He swore the trees howled out a warning with the harmony of the winter's cruel wind, but whether these were the bitter calls of those who had trusted the false lanterns before or those who sheltered the lights from the eyes of men like Claude, he had no hope of knowing. 

All he knew now was the blue of the light, the strike of color against heaps of snow like the strike of color against the stone and flint. How could even such a small flame sustain its form in a snowing like this? He was determined to know, determined to chase as he always was. His sure feet had guided him into knowledge from his earliest days suckling milk, and he knew his death would one day await him for following the confidence of his feet, which seemed to move before the cautions of his head. Perhaps his death awaited him even now, lurking in the belly of the blue flame ahead, shivering in the cold as he must be. Even so, his steps did not falter, for he would walk as readily towards death as he did discovery. Death was an unknown, and so death and discovery were the same. 

Alas, his dark gloves dove into the snow to cradle the light and came up empty of death _or_ discovery. The light was gone, plucked away from him at the edge of the looming forest, as if someone had tied it to a string and yanked it away to tease a kitten.

And were they not all helpless and led by string by the whims of the gods of Fate? He smiled, for the mystery awaited him, quivering more temptingly now than it had before. Anyway, now that Claude was well and truly on the cusp of being swallowed by the snow and trees, he couldn't turn back. No sane man entered a forest called Thorn in such conditions; alone and unattended by comrades, unencumbered by a healthy dose of unease, and shrugging more than a few inches of weather off his shoulders. But no genius was ever sane, and no other man was Claude von Riegan. And when he saw the tease of the lanternless light a second time, deep in the gloom, he followed as recklessly as the child who fought away his shadows with a branch and stones.

* * *

**_Chapter One_ **

Two shadows lengthened on the expanse of white sheeting, one lithe and looming, the other short and twiglike. But the steps they took were heavy with the bad news they carried, and the heavier weight of forced optimism.

“You didn’t find him?” The healer rushed forward to greet them, her palms as naked and glowing white as the storm, ready to breathe life into a man they had not carried back who would be far lighter than their burdens.

“No,” the bowman revealed helplessly, pulling the hood from his hair which had not helped to shield him. “We looked _everywhere.”_

“We didn’t look _everywhere,”_ the lithe shadow said, refusing to uncover her own face, intent on going back into the storm, her hood as scarlet as the tent flaps in the case of needing to uncover her bright corpse. “Didn’t even get as far as the perimeter of the trees. Just came to drop little Ignatz off,” she grinned, ruffling his wet hair, ringing with ice.

“Judith…” The healer’s palms quieted, no longer giving off the eerie light of the arcane. There was nothing and no one for her to heal anyway. “Do you think… do you think he’s…?”

“Claude? _Dead?”_ she chuckled behind the mask. “We should be so lucky! No, Marianne, he’s out there, making a fool of himself and chasing shadows like the brat he is.”

Only he was not chasing shadows. He was chasing light.

Down, down he chased the glass-lifted lanterns, his boots leaving marks that lasted only moments before a playful wind swept the evidence away, and a torrent of snow was its partner, covering his tracks. Brat he may be, yet he was not naive. In his hands, he no longer attempted to cage or cradle the lights. Instead, he grasped the thin belly of his bow, cutting at dead vines with the sharp blade of an arrow he crafted for this purpose. Too long and too wide of an arrowhead to shoot swiftly, this particular instrument was meant to punch a hole into flesh at close range, staggering a large foe.

No movement was wasted in Claude, nor meaningless. He did not cut vines without purpose; the angle and power of each cut was calculated to remind him of his way, to make a path that no heft of snow could cover. The only details he could not have accounted for--the weather and his lack of experience sweeping on in such a blizzard--he improvised with ease, he took in his stride. Across a rough rock or over dewey grass, Claude was silent as the fox, anticipating the crunch of fallen leaves and weighing the potential risk of root or badgerhole. But the looseness of snow was not a stranger to him so much; it was as shifting as a dune of sand, and he was arguably _more_ accustomed to this than slate or plain.

In that way, his gait was still swift, though it was made silent only by the wind’s shrieking, which muffled all but the cries of strange birds who, to his curiosity, did not burrow in their nests in such weather. Had he the time, he’d have tried to capture them in his sight, learn if they were hardy enough to withstand the gales, or if they were merely foolish.

“Foolish as myself,” he chuckled to no one, the echoes of his voice swallowed by freezing air mere inches from his mouth. But he could not afford to stop and look for birds. The lanterns were growing further apart and fewer in number, appearing in trickier spots high in the wicked branches or low in a valley of ice. So Claude pursued over frozen streams and catching thorns as they grew more numerous, intent on ripping his protective coat to shreds so he might succumb to the winter.

Swift as he was and quiet as the storm covered him, he was soon discovered by the denizens who slept or stood as sentinels to the inner sanctums of the Forest of Thorns. No mortal could hope to escape their notice, no matter how experienced, nor true.

One of these glimpsed his scarlet coat even before he managed to make it to the treeline, for her eyes were bright with the cunning of eagles seeking such prey. And to be honest, he was not cleverly camouflaged prey. Her wings brushed the snow from the mantle of her aurous crown of horns, silent as the owl lifting from a perch of petrified forest as even the snow was not disturbed by her ascent. She was the looker of unusual things, she was the noticer of noteworthy occurrence, and Claude was both by her estimation. She shed not a single dark feather nor frozen snowflake as she winged over the pines, tapping each treetop with her talons, keeping count of how many lengths he deepened his stride inward, towards the heart of the forest.

Humans were not usually so stupid, nor bold enough to ignore the screech of the pine’s howls. Stupid and overly bold he may be, but she matched him calculation for calculation and she tracked each strike of his knife and knew he was not here without purpose. He was not as _lost_ as he pretended to be. Perhaps he even knew a presence--not _her_ presence, mind--but that a shadow might be following. Perhaps that’s why he hurried, rushing in with all the stealth a human can muster in a perishable body. But he did not look once at the skies. Perhaps he was just blind, chasing--

Her talons caught fast to the tip of a pine branch, her eyes stilled for a moment. Why did the wisps welcome him? For surely that must be what he was chasing with such leisure. But the will-o’-wisps were not ones to lead human life into the Winter directly. Yet there, in nearly a straight and daringly _manageable_ path they teased him down, and she saw that they were betraying the one they supposedly served. The chimney smoke, choked from the sky by the thickest thickets, the wisps led this invader to it with willful treason.

She loosed a furious cry, full of wrath but not without intention, full of wrath _and_ warning, both to the traitorous wisps to watch that their end may come at the tear of her talons and to the creature who hoisted the axe over his shoulder, done making fuel for the warmth of the cabin hidden in the pines.

Of course, the first sound that the forest succumbed to echoed around Claude and rattled his bones against one another, knocking the light from his hands that he’d finally managed to capture against the cradle of his palms, which kept the frostbite only just at bay. He didn’t have to bother searching for the source of the call as the light fled him, the limn of the beast’s shadow covering the color of his coat as it outlined the snow he had disturbed. It was the very bestial nature of instinct that saved him, as it had over and over again in the past, beast against beast, both of them diving into the snow--one to the right and the other to the left, one grateful to have been missed by massive claws, the other bereft to have been missing him. Her talons buried only in snow, piercing the frozen earth that slept beneath it when she’d have been far more delighted to see her claws bathed in human blood.

Claude knew it would be faster next time, born of fury that it had lost its mark in a brush of thorns, but he didn’t plan to give it another chance. Instinct was rarely so kind twice in the same day, even for a man as lucky as he was, and he knew that. He counted the quickened breaths his lungs offered to the sheet of air that could shove itself next to him in the densest foliage, a wreath of pointed thorns that drew his blood more easily than _she_ would have. _With far less fatality,_ Claude’s instinct instructed him needlessly.

Casting even the quickest of glances to the canopy to find where it was thickest, he had to marvel at the idea of those little lanternless lights. If something was clever enough to lure him to the talons of some enormous raven, then he wanted to meet it, glimpse its face, the intentional directing of its eyes. He knew he _should_ be afraid, but instead he wore the bush of thorns as his temporary sanctuary, peering through the knives of the wood to catch sight of--

Yes, there it was, every needed sign that these pines held secrets no mortal thing could ever survive. The raven bore the flat face and eyes of a woman _._ She hissed for him even now, her twisted serpent of a neck turning about in search of what didn’t belong in _her_ forest. Only it wasn’t hers and Claude knew it. He’d never have been able to escape the true ruler of this court. Even knowing that, he was anxious to find him, to put himself at the mercy of his claws. Without the wisps, he didn’t know where to find him now, the King of the beasts of this place…

But _she_ knew.

Hissing at the barrier of the dead brush that kept her from her prey, the harpy rose again, this time not bothering to keep still or silent, taking off like a black-fletched arrow into the sky once more, stirring up the settled snow into another blizzard so potent she might have been the wind herself. She knew exactly where this human hid, but she could not reach him without significant pain she was not willing to suffer for his kind. Instead, she would go and warn her King. And even though this would be the perfect opportunity to turn his tail around and flee back to the safety of the open plains, Claude followed the trail of ink her wrathful shadow left in the snowing that deepened with every step. Followed her right into the den of predators beyond even _his_ imagination.

The woodcutter carried his precious armful to the back door of his cabin, sheltered only by a cloak and mantle of furs that looked blue against the snow, forgetting the hue it had been originally until the hearth of his home shed light on it once more. He was oblivious to the excitement of the morning--indeed, he was oblivious to the morning at all. The sun did not shine upon his face, no matter where he walked. As the lonesome King of Winter, he did not know its warmth and he never would. But he knew the agitated shriek of his sentinel as she winged overhead, unable to penetrate the pines, seeking her familiar opening and finding once again that the ‘typical’ she was used to had transformed. A sure harbinger of trouble ushered in by an unknown hand.

“Dimitri,” she hissed as she finally wriggled into the impenetrable heart of the King’s wood, her talons gripping a low branch that only supported her weight because it was ordered to.

“Edelgard,” the woodcutter said stiffly, not turning his head to her as he settled the wood only the ever-growing pile. Really, there was too much already, but it was only routine that kept him from constantly charging down the borders of sanity, close to tipping at many points of the perpetual Winter and Night that was the Forest of Thorns. “What is it? You seem troubled.” And yet, in complete antithesis to his proposed worry, he continued to arrange the firewood as if there was nothing more important to do.

_Would you even notice if I were,_ the harpy strained herself not to bite. If he had, perhaps he’d look at her even once, perhaps he’d call her the name he used to call her.

“The wisps,” she told him, obedient in practice but rebellious in theory. “They have led a human inside the Thorns.”

“Is that so unusual?” he sighed, still keeping the blue of his mantle on his back to her. She hadn’t glimpsed even the shyest look of him in decades, and yet seeing his cloak become blue… perhaps Thorn would perish when _he_ did after all. “They’re always playing games.”

“This isn’t a _game,”_ she insisted, bringing the rebellious theory into the foreground of this luminous snow, as if to paint it as a battleground instead; a battleground between the two of them, black and blue as a warring bruise that lied about being fresh when truly it was centuries old. “They were leading the human right to your house.”

He stopped because indeed, that was curious, but mustering the alarm or the concern he should have felt for the news was thousands of energies he didn’t possess and hadn’t possessed in so many eras. “A human,” he whispered to himself, his breath the very frost that scaffolded the weather, supported the belly of the ancient storm clouds above him. But even though the chill of his breath reached the skies and stirred up the snow like a furious stew of ice, his single eye did not reach even the snow at his feet. He looked no further than the reach of his hands anymore, and not since he was young enough to have the brightness of _both_ eyes did he see anything worth looking at. He barely heard his sentinel at all, a miracle indeed, for she had tried to reach him through her usual channels so many times that the trunks of the pines were scored with tallies. “Why would a human come here?”

Edelgard folded the feathers over her back as though shielding her spine from the cold of him. “For what purpose have humans _always_ come here?” she reminded him, more gently than before, for he was still her brother, and though he did not need the burden of the Winter Court, she wanted to shoulder him even now. “For your head at worst,” she furied, bristling like a mother fox, “Or the wings of a harpy,” she gestured to herself as if that might churn him enough to care. “Or the fur of one of your loyal beasts. Yet the wisps _led_ them in, led them near to your home. Just give the order and I will see them punished.” She’d do it herself, and honestly, she’d do it even if he forbade her from it.

“Why?” he laughed and the cold jumped, turbulent at the touch of his sound, but his shoulders didn’t even shake; there was no mirth to hear. “What could one human possibly do to me?” he asked her, but was he really asking her? It sounded more as though he was posing the question to the ghosts who clung and pulled at his cloak with their ceaseless whimpers. And it was hopeful too, as though wishing by some miracle that this particular human bore some ancient weapon that could pierce the flesh of the King of Beasts.

She wanted to hurt him, to carry him off into the storm above the pines to show him what he’d been missing, and then drop him a few times to remind him of the life he carried within his breast, or the lives he was duty-bound to shelter within his heart while it kept beating. She knew he still must care for her at least, or he’d not have heard her. He’d not have seen her at all anymore. So many of his beasts could no longer reach him as the tangle of thorns around this tiny home became a ceaseless labyrinth even for the smallest breeze to get through. Of course, the breezes only ever went _out,_ out through his lips and plunging the forest into that ceaseless Winter that shielded them, had been their barrier from the invading reach of humanity’s wonders for so long.

At least they still had that. He may not see or sing to them anymore, but he still kept them safe.

“Dimitri, please,” she begged him. She _never_ resorted to begging, not even when she was a mere hatchling at the beginning of this wood. “If you want to chop wood until only the thorns are left to burn, then do so happily,” she fought, stepping closer, her talons now small and bare feet more than talons. “Let _me_ protect you.”

She had already been chased out of her own Court, too young at the time of the human infestation to save her own beasts. Taken into the loving protection of her brother’s family, she wanted nothing more for him than to let him rest in mourning of the kin that they had both lost, but which were tethered to him by more shared blood and loving memory than she. He deserved that; she believed that he had suffered enough and she wanted to return the favor of his family taking her under their wings. She had a wingspan enough for her beloved brother and all in his Kingdom, the willpower and the vengeful hatred for the pillagers to drive them away. To butcher them one by one if she must.

But he would not let her. He would not stop and set aside his burdens, his great shoulders stooped with the safety of the beasts who made the thorns into freezing nests.

“Edelgard…”

Both were silenced by the sudden carrying of scent that stole into their senses, which would ever prove more delicate than a mortal beast’s, more sensitive than the paranoia of the young deer, more keen than the hunger of the starving wolf. A human had joined their conversation, thinking himself hidden and silent, or knowing that he would gather their attention at the corners and, tugging at the snare, bag their scrutiny like the wildest game.

The woman Edelgard, slight and pale, became an eruption of night, of plumage which grew from her skin with the rearrangement of perfectly natural bones, piercing her through, pretty as newladen snow and brittle as gold. She grew limbs like the ripping of new flesh cut by the sword and the harpy shrieked once more as the raven darkness overcame her features, her naked breast clothed in the feathered necklace of her true form. Dimitri did not change at all, not in any way which might be visible to a naked eye.

But he turned, he looked, and he _saw_ beyond his reach, drawn by the crown of wisps that encircled his boots in an appetent dance, the children of the Winter eager to show their King the gift that they had so errantly brought before him.

The King of Beasts and the mortal trespasser shared only one common courtesy, that of meeting one another first by the eye, a fringe of dirty, gilded hair covering the hole of one that could not be met, and the other’s unhidden and unhindered by the frame of his own curls, the depth of which was coppery like his skin and not at all a color which belonged to the sleepy hues of wintertide.

The mortal told him, “I’m lost,” in the warmest way, melting the air before him.

And the King, his breath like the fog over the frozen lakes of his wilds said, “I know.”

  
  



	2. Castle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A human comes to the castle in the thorns and (mostly) invites himself in.

The only shard of natural heat that could exist amongst the thorns was within the cabin that the King called his castle. The clean wooden walls bore no resemblance to the rigid stone of such a structure, but as he pressed open the door to let the cold in, the warmth of the fire, ever-burning within, reached out with licking yellow tongues and connected with Claude, recognizing its brother in his heart. Dimitri did not need to explain that it was magic any more than he had to explain why the raven harpy had shot into the canopy, showering them with thousands of needles from the thickest pines as soon as the human had opened his mouth and ushered a mortal voice from his throat.

‘She is shy,’ he had offered instead, to which Claude did not reply other than to disbelieve him. He knew she was not. Those who were shy did not dive on their prey with a shriek of hellish fury. They did not promise a slow and torturous death with their eyes as they cast them towards the thorn bush of his hiding place. Still, it was amusing to hear the man lie. He was terrible at it.

“Thank you,” Claude said graciously, ushered in from the blizzard.

The pines did their fair share of keeping the snow from building too high around the castle, but it could not block the cold, which came from the breath of the denizen within their forest. Within the cabin’s walls, the blizzard of the King’s exhalations and the firestorm of the hearth battled for dominance, but whenever Dimitri caught himself winning, he’d add yet more wood. He consumed more of the forest bit by bit, making the shelter of his beasts smaller and smaller just so he might remember the warmth of a hearth.

“Odd to find another person so far out here.”

Dimitri lifted his head and shoulders from their typical stoop of a much older and wiser man. “I suppose it is,” he returned the mysterious volley and did not bother with a longer explanation. “You must be weary. I have water and dried meat if you would like.”

Claude was not the sort to be deterred by non-answers like those. He was also eternally patient. “I  _ am  _ tired,” he admitted, a little smile fixed over his lips that refused to fade as he pulled his coat off like peeling dry paint from a dirty wall (though the snow had kept him very far from the concerns of being dry). “And I’d appreciate some food.” He certainly would, but not more than he appreciated the view of the man who lurked here, carrying firewood to and fro like a ferryman across a river of creaking wooden floors. He was a certain sort of beautiful, the sort which loomed and threatened the space of any chamber, shadowing the inhabitants, tricking the room into thinking it was much smaller than it was. And inside, not painted against the backdrop of wicked dark pines and relentless ice, the stranger was more than just big; he shone with a gold that had faded, an ancient beast in need of a new coat for the season.

_ Golden,  _ Claude whispered with awe to the dark corners of his own mind, sharing his enthusiasm with himself since there was no one to share it with. No one yet.

Dimitri shed his cloak like a snakeskin, happy to be free of its confines. He shook it loose like a dog, then became the most attractive shade of pink as he plucked it hastily from the floor. “Forgive me. I do not often have guests… it seems I have forgotten how to behave.”

But every motion, every gesture he showed made only the most sense to Claude. He could not hide himself from the human's clever eyes. “Think nothing of it. I’ve done the same before.” He absolutely had not. He never once felt comfortable enough in his own skin to be vulnerable like this, even when he fancied himself alone. He gratefully accepted an old wooden plate of jerky. He wondered if this was all the man ate. But what nutrition could be obtained out here but meat? No fruits would grow in this constant weather and even the hardiest of vegetables would be near impossible to find. Amongst frozen thorns was hardly the place to trifle over delicacy. “What brings you all the way out here?”

Dimitri’s back was to him, his face nearly pressed into the fire as if to test if this newfound warmth he felt was indeed from his polite intruder or the fire was just fed more than it usually was. “I live here.”

Claude knew that already, but such a truth would surely shock anyone else. “Oh?” His eyes raked over the tunic that stuck to the man’s back. “Quite a remote place to live.”

“It is best remote,” he answered. “Who are you?”

“They call me Claude.” That wasn’t his name of course, but that would come with time. “And you?”

The King waited before he offered such information, waited until he saw Claude taste the food. Looking over his shoulder he could see him sitting completely at ease. No human was ever at ease here. Was this a particularly foolish one? Or a particularly nihilistic one? “Dimitri.”

“Dimitri,” Claude repeated. He knew the man was watching him eat with expectation and he didn’t mind fulfilling those expectations. He knew he was safe here, safe now, though explaining  _ why  _ he knew that would take far more away from the piling of stones he wanted to do to reach the peak of this particular mountain. He never cut through the anticipation of the climb if he could help it. And he still had complete control over this situation no matter what. He didn’t need strength or magic to hold it still; only the willpower over himself which he had so diligently gardened since the day of his birth when he cried in the face of his first assassin. “What a charming name.”

“And what brings  _ you  _ here?” Dimitri turned on him, clearly attempting to leap to the top of the mountain without putting in the work.

“I’m lost,” Claude smiled, knowing his response to fall frustratingly short of what was considered agreeable. So many of his peers and so many complaints later and he’d be blind not to know it. Dimitri, however, didn’t make his annoyance apparent if he felt any, the wells of his deep chest shaking with a quiet chuckle.

“Not many make it all the way here merely being  _ lost,”  _ he quipped, but he turned his great shoulder towards Claude like the mast of a ship, his tunic flowing like sailcloth.

Claude smiled back. “Well I’m really, truly, and  _ extremely  _ lost, then."

"Truly," Dimitri accepted that, as one must if they knew they'd not be given proper answers. He might have asked to what purpose Claude had found himself lost; nothing near even the border of the forest hinted of shelter. There was only snow, no food, no money, no company to be gained from wandering and losing oneself here. So what purpose had he wreaked upon himself? He seated himself with his back to the fire normally, but this morning he'd settle at the juxtaposing side of Claude's eyes. And there they sat, one across the other, with the burning hearth blackening the forest's trees, the only witness to the absurdity of this appointment. "How long do you plan to be lost?"

The bitter touch of Claude's smile did not add or detract temperature from the air. Such a neutral smile, Dimitri did not know how to weave it into the fabric of his understanding. "Mm. Forever," he posed, touching his chin in a coy little way, as though the brushing of his own face was the press of a mask that he molded this way and that, suited to his ever changing whim. "I've only ever moved from one 'lost' to another. I'd wager you know all about that."

"And what would you be willing to wager on that?" Dimitri laughed, a sound which had not grated against these walls since they were still living pines. The arrogance of this man was  _ funny  _ to him, in the way that he'd surely be struck dumb by it if he believed it to be true. 

"The only thing anyone can truly give," Claude said without malice, without mirth, the bitterness shed to a moment that  _ did  _ strike Dimitri dumb; a sort of tenderness that no one could mold into a proper shape because it was rough and haggard and  _ real, _ too imperfect, too impure to be false.

"And what is that?" Dimitri didn't know. 

"One's life."

The fire spit out a spark and utterly died, finally claimed by the freeze of the King's stuttering breathing. Not once in centuries had this light been allowed to die. Not once did it go without a constant feed, the evidence of which piled high around three outer walls of the cabin, the blunt head of a weary axe in sore need of its hundredth replacement leaning in its familiar bed against the threshold of the inner door, brought in from the cold like a pitiful dog. 

"You speak as though you know me," Dimitri hesitated. 

"You speak as though I don't," was Claude's only protest. Well after all, he only needed the one, didn't he? 

Dimitri stood then, because he had been so assured in his worthlessness, he'd been so secure in his isolation, so satisfied with the company of his misery, enough that rather than consume him, it  _ became  _ him, that this sudden mystery was as jarring as seeing a fairweather sky for the first time from the cover of a cave; he didn't know what to do with the endless space of this sudden emptiness of reason.

"I should shore up the fire," he said, because that made sense to say, even if Claude didn't seem to care at all about the darkness of the world now. He only watched as Dimitri left, his boots making puddles of the snow on his porch, stomping about to put noise into the silence, make it comfortable for him again, like a cat which kneads the threads from a pillow. But it would never go back to the way it was again, never; Claude would see to that.

There wasn't much time. Indeed, if Claude thought that Dimitri was simply going to get wood, he wouldn't even chance it, but he knew what he was really looking for, shuffling around outside on the weak and moaning deck. Claude had seen it many times, when people would go out on some task to figure out their confidence again. He'd shaken him, and he was sincerely sorry, but it was a good opportunity, perhaps his only one.

From his many hidden pockets, Claude emptied the things he chanced to bring this deep into the pines. Maps that were obsolete the moment he set foot in the castle, half-witted tales scratched down under weak tavern torchlight by mortals long dead, symbols and runes that patterned into alphabets known only to man from these papers alone; rituals and rites that, once burned, would only be seen again etched in weathered standing stones, hidden far from the long-gone eyes that copied them with a scraping of charcoal. 

And burn they did. Into the hearth went these most precious of jewels, fed not one by one, but in a cascade of thick parchment, browned and curling, flaking to fuel the new flame as the smell of crisping ink unfurled into the tiny old lodge. When the door opened again and Dimitri’s arms were closed over snow-wet branches and logs, he did not expect to see the flames of the dead embers roaring again, yet there they were, searing an orange color onto the palms of this coy stranger.

No paper in this or any world could revive a fire so strongly. 

"How did you do that?" Dimitri put the firewood aside, given as it so clearly was no longer needed.

Claude smiled at him, his hands still up to the fire's heat as if in reverent prayer. "Do you have a place we could rest?"

* * *

The permanence of human hands could not hope to cradle the light of a wisp, but the talons of a harpy could not fail, even with how cunning and quick the wisp boasted itself to legend. And that aside, the punishment of evading the harpy could not be ignored. As she flew up, jettisoned towards the sky by punching a hole in the furious canopy of the pines, the wisp wriggled in the flash of her more transient claws. 

"Oh lighten up, Ellie!" the wisp moaned from the view of the skies. "It's called having  _ fun." _

"Fun is almost killing my poor, tortured brother?" the harpy hissed, issued from the terrifying vortex of her maw. When aimed at prey, the effect of fear played about their senses before it ever showed on their skin, but only when subjected to it the one time before their inevitable ends. The wisp had seen the teeth and black tongue more than any mortal could chance, and she did not shiver. 

"Well, yeah," the wisp shrugged, and the rolling movement of her shoulders prompted Edelgard to let go of her. It was only half on purpose, but she figured that this particular end justified the means of her punishing intent. She followed the plummeting flame of the wisp at half the pace, alighting her weight upon a low branch and tucking the hollow bones of her wings behind her.

"I've had enough, Hapi. This is not the first time you've played one of your more dangerous tricks, but you won't endanger him again."

The hole that had been burned by the heat of her fall was deep enough to plunge the wisp halfway into the sleeping earth below, but still the brown hands that crawled out of it were like stiff, frozen insects before the contrast of a smiling face could follow. "Oh, come  _ on,  _ Ellie. It was just one tiny human. Not even a big one!" If only the size of the human could lower the risk, Edelgard snapped back in thought but she'd hear Hapi plead her case before she eviscerated her light into nothingness once more. "And you know that's not the first one I've let in."

"You've never led them to his  _ door  _ before now, and I tolerated that well enough."

"What human could hurt Didi anyway?" the wisp protested, not eager to defend her choices exhaustively to a deaf bird of a woman. "Even a hundred of them all marching in with swords would be immediately slain."

"Humans," Edelgard told her, and not for the first time, "Are not in the business of only having one means of killing us. And he is weak to them, you know."

The wisp's eyes, like two little coins, lured the harpy in, shifting her grip on the branch. "He is?" Hapi breathed, pulling herself out of the snow completely to where her light shone with a reflective brilliance upon its surface, but which gave off no heat. "Didn't know Didi was weak to anything except woodcutting."

Edelgard peered down her hawkish nose. This impudent wisp, weak and childish, typified by an indolence broken only by bouts of boredom and a spasm of trickery, wasn't worth even her mildest punishment.

Hapi was cowed by her look. This severe bird, wound tight and ever paranoid, typified by an ancient fear in her feathered breast that had not reared its head in hundreds of human years, wasn't worth even the laziest explanation she could give. But she'd try it anyway. 

"Ellie, it's been too long since there was any  _ fun  _ to be had here," she complained, low and bereft of her usual grin. "What are we protecting if we live this way? Running and hiding in the trees, sleeping away the hours--" 

"You've  _ never  _ complained about sleeping."

"--and just generally cowering like mice?" Hapi tossed her hand left and right, indicating the whole of the forest and all of its inhabitants. "We're  _ not _ mice. And I think if we all tried a little harder, maybe Didi wouldn't be cutting down the forest day and night so he could just sit around pining for the dead."

_ "Hush."  _ Edelgard's voice was cutting, severe in the surrounding air, as if she could silence words that had already been uttered. "He can hear you, Hapi. He can hear everything on the wind." After all, the wind was his breath, the ice its culmination, the absolution of his external body, pierced through by thousands of thorns. 

"Well maybe he  _ should  _ hear."

The talons that so delicately wrapped around the branches clamped so viciously over the wisp's throat that the antithesis of being would be like Winter and Summer. But that's just how Winter was; both serene and fatal, savage and sleeping.

"I don't care what tricks you play, Hapi," Edelgard said, pinning her to the ice beneath the snow that covered a lake where the beasts of Thorn once drank their fill of its waters together. "But do not endanger your friends. If you want to fix his woes, be my guest. But do it by yourself. Humans too often have their own uses for us. They don't want to help."

And she took flight before Hapi could play her own game on her. The wisp lay flat against the solidity of earth and wondered how this mortal had followed her so far. Something was different about that one. She'd wager the only thing one could truly wager on that. 

* * *

There was only one room in the castle and within it there was crammed all the activities that would take place in such a room. Working, eating, sleeping, bathing all happened there, the only privacy afforded to its singular inhabitant was the walls that couldn't even keep the Winter out when the Winter lived inside. But it had been enough for the King before because it was built only to shield the rest of the world from viewing his misery full-time. The castle was not built with family in mind; not built for even one other occupant. 

But Claude did not care for privacy, a luxury he neither had nor liked. He worked, ate, and bathed in that single room, using the fire and snowmelt for a freezing bath that shook his nerves right out of his flesh, both bracing and necessary. And now he would sleep there, wrapped in every linen Dimitri possessed on top of every fur Dimitri had once hunted and skinned.

And he slept here in this freezing wasteland with the truest feeling of safety. No human but him could penetrate the barrier of this storm, none but him could weather the temper of such beasts, test the frozen waters of a King's temper and sleep unscathed under his blankets and on top of his furs, the most polite of uninvited guests.

And it occurred to Dimitri that he probably  _ shouldn't  _ be allowing him to sleep there in safety, with all of his comforts. What human could boast the same? Surely the King of Beasts should not suffer this injustice of being muscled out of his own blankets by a man who wouldn't even tell him his real name. Yet he just stared at him all night until dawn, just watching the ebb and tide of his breath, warm as a human's was to counter the cool of his own.

He looked at him for so long that he didn't even see the last of the ritual circles burn from existence in the fire that no one else dared feed but him until this day. 

  
  



	3. Fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The King runs from his own peculiar guest but he can't run from his daily report.

Claude was not at all disturbed by the single blue lantern which looked in on his heart, or attempted to. The thing was, the lock over the pendant where he kept that heart was always open to the King. The King may not know it yet, poor thing; he was so lost. But that’s why Claude was here; to help find him so they could be lost together.

And so absorbed in the threshold of the pendant, the King did not see him open his eyes at all. He continued to play the unmoving rock with one shoulder to the flames and cast in red, the other blue as shadows.  _ That has always been you,  _ Claude wanted to laugh, yet he did not dare, he did not dare change the pattern of his air, lest he wreck the spell. The beast’s hands were loosely clasped, uncommitted, on his knees, between his legs, as though he was waiting for someone to press them together in a firmer weave for him. The child within did not know how.

How long they played this game where only one of the participants was aware of the game, Claude did not care, did not take to mind the running dark, chased away by a sun that never quite pierced the pinetops. He was happy to play this game alone, for in the end, his victory would be just as it became in reality; the moment the King recognized his wakefulness for what it was, he became dark in the face. But he did not look away. His gaze, single-eyed and stronger than those with double, was adhering to him like a burr. Like a thorn.

“You slept well?” he asked, his voice, unused for all the night and for half the life of him, was damp with concern.

“Why do you ask? Don’t you know?” Claude played, the game lengthened and stretched by his words, dancing on the precarious tilt of his lip. “You were watching me.” Not an accusation. He held the lock of the pendant open for Dimitri to step in.

The King turned away. “Forgive me,” he mumbled.

“No.”

The King stopped getting up halfway, an awkward stance for a marble statue like himself to be carved. “What?”

“No,” Claude laughed again. “I won’t forgive you. You must do your penance.”

And as the dawning of understanding came over the King’s face like the petal of a rose in color, he seemed to realize Claude was playing. Was teasing him. But Claude was utterly serious. “What sort of penance must I do?” he smiled, Dimitri again and not the King at all.

Claude stretched to get up, but he didn’t go very far. Just a bend at the waist to face him more appropriately. He was, of course, gowned in Dimitri’s own clothing, rough fabric woven a long time ago by travelers who no longer lived. And yet the way it slipped down over the ridges of Claude’s shoulders was, somehow, reminiscent of some feeling Dimitri did not know how to name. It wasn’t something he’d felt before, of that he was sure, and yet he had carved a hole for it long ago, expecting it to one day be filled. Of course he had forgotten about that carving until a sudden marble slotted into it and displaced the dust in a shower.

“You must…” This was a game and in order for it to be most entertaining, Claude had not predicted for himself how it would go, preferring to improvise it on the dance of comfort between them both. Indeed, Dimitri  _ did  _ feel it too, but it wasn’t a comfortable comfort. Yet another slot that must be filled. “You must bring me the rarest fruit in the forest,” Claude taunted.  _ One might balance a teacup on that lip,  _ Dimitri thought,  _ and never know its fate until it falls.  _ A perpetual smile was there on that copper face, but it would fall sometime, he knew it. And when it did and the teacup broke, Dimitri didn’t have the slightest clue how he might find all the pieces, let alone put them back together again.

And… how long had it been since he had thought of a  _ teacup?  _ Had he ever seen one? Surely he must have, or else he doubted he could think of one.

“No fruit grows here, I’m afraid,” Dimitri told him. _Forget balancing any cup on his_ **lip,** Dimitri realized, watching one of Claude’s dark eyebrows disappear under the curled curtain of his bangs. Every part of him was so animated, even when still, like a resonance that could not control when it stopped. Perhaps he could learn the patterns. He longed to.

“There must be  _ one,”  _ Claude said, and his knowing was so low, so intoned, that Dimitri was struck once again by it. What did he know and why did he know it? Because there  _ was  _ fruit here. Just one tree. Just one. And every year, it blossomed once, just one fruit, the most precious thing this forest could bear. Aside from thorns, what else could this forest offer?

“How…?” But the castle wall shook with a gentle knocking because it was weak with the winter wind Dimitri breathed onto the walls.

It was the time for his report.

  
  


Dedue knew how well the King loved his routine. He required nothing more that came at the expense of his nerves; no surprises. Dedue did not intend to let him live that way, not forever. He was a beast of growth, a foreigner like Edelgard, also a stranger to the winter. He was an eloper, an interloper between what was warm and what was frozen. At his insistence, the snow parted reluctantly, only it made it such a task for him that it could not be called anything but a chore. It mattered not if it was easy. He was more than merely insistent. He was a gardener, a caretaker of earth, and the saplings  _ did _ grow here, but only barely.

But he, too, was withering in the winter breath. As a beast who roamed from one season to the opposite, never content with either, he was not constructed for only winter, but he could not leave his beloved King here. Without a clan, without a kin of his own, perhaps, Dedue had seen someone who needed care and shouldered the mantle out of necessity not only for the King of Beasts but for himself too. He was at his best when he cared for something. If only he could brush the snow from Dimitri’s shoulders too.

This was his own way of doing it, ambling up and watching the way his deep, scouring tracks departed the world with the blanketing swirl of snow. He curled his rusty paw and waited as he always did. There was not much variance in this part of his day, but he relied on a schedule as much as the King did. In that, they were kin indeed.

“Dedue.”

He parted from the door. “Edelgard,” he responded in that warm way that one did when using names as greetings, recognizing all that they were and calling out in acceptance of them. She was perched on the cabin’s roof, crowning the castle with the berth of her black wings. “What brings you here? What of the border?”

Sometimes the border was opened to admit a wayward human or two, every decade or so. Not purposefully, except by a mischievous wisps.

She shook the ice from her feathers, but what showered Dedue was not deadly. “Nothing to report. Hapi let one in again.” She dared not speak of the human beyond the castle door, or surely Dedue would want to do something about it, and while he was a careful beast, she didn’t want to stir anything up when it seemed the King so needed this. They could find another way to be rid of him when Dimitri left the castle before the next dawn as he always did; well, always with the exception of the night before when the mysteries came to him instead, it seemed, from outside the pines.

“Ah.” Dedue smiled. He liked Hapi. Despite her mischief, she enlivened an otherwise dead place, summered what would have been strictly winter. Edelgard doubted he’d be smiling like that if he knew she’d led a human right into the King’s heart. “Well, has the forest taken care of them yet?” He had no reason to be suspicious of Edelgard’s reporting.

She didn’t know which was better to tell him. Both choices weighed on one of her wings, whether the right or left, she would fly just as clumsily either way. “Yes.” She was not a creature of half-answers, or half-lies as it were. She lived only in absolutes, an attribute that Hapi wished to attribute not to her. “As it always will eventually. Where are Sylvain and Felix?”

Dedue shook his head. “Sylvain is playing,” as he always was, “And I believe Felix is hunting.”

“Are they together?”

“As well as playing and hunting go together, yes.”

“And they didn’t report a human to you?”

Now Dedue was catching onto her questions. She was ruffled and that was not like her. And now that he realized how much the sun had risen, the King had not opened his door either. “Should they have?” He knocked again.

“No,” she said decidedly. She needed to find Hubert. And perhaps Hapi again. “But it pays to be thorough.” She had to look away from him as she said it. It did not necessarily mean that she was lying, Dedue knew. She was forever turning her head, looking out. That was her job as a sentinel, of course, and she was ever vigilant. But her worry became his, and even when she kicked some of the ice from the cabin roof by taking off, that worry lingered, even as he raised his paw to knock on the castle door for a third time.

Fortunately, he did not need to. The door opened with such a wind’s force that the carefully stacked tower of logs (that seemed to grow higher and higher and never show the windows that had been built into the castle) shook but did not fall. The King stacked them too reliably.

“Dedue,” the King breathed and the frost of it clung to Dedue’s pelt with a sharpness that was even more concerning than usual. “I apologize for not answering before now.”

“Your Highness,” Dedue breathed, his own warmth yet unable to melt the winter’s wind. “What is the matter? Edelgard spoke to me just now of a human breach.”

The King’s face and voice betrayed no emotion, as it ever was set like stone, but Dedue was not so dense as to miss the way his hand clamped over the threshold, splintering the wood. Yet another mistake of the untamed power of even a sleeping season that Dedue would have to mask. Not that he ever minded. Everything needed replacing every now and again, and it broke the routine just enough that it was still comfortable. Still known. “A human?” the King asked.

“Yes,” Dedue replied, still eyeing the crack in the door. “You need not worry. I can carry that worry well enough for the both of us. She seemed to think they had been chased off already, and she is never wrong about these things.”

“Yes… yes of course.”

A silence stretched between them and snapped taut--odd. Dedue was usually able to feel the King’s muscles loosen whenever Dedue was around to care for him. “May I come in?”

“No.” It wasn’t sharp or harsh, but it interrupted the routine somewhat. Something was wrong, but the brown bear did not mind the cold of the outside too, since it was always even colder wherever Dimitri was. He did not wish to tread on the sacred space of the small castle if His Highness desired the privacy of it. He glimpsed the windows of the opposite wall of the structure and thought idly that he might weave him some curtains; perhaps he was piling the logs because he desired to be hidden.

“Very well.” No offense taken there. He shifted his shoulders, a little wary of why Dimitri had taken his human shape for so long. If it continued, perhaps he might be stuck like this, in the tight body and the infinitesimally powerless form of a man. Dedue was not normally so much bigger than he was. But he remembered, sweetly, how the little cub that was now the King had told him he liked to be enveloped in Dedue’s furry arms before a fire anyhow. It had been so long since he allowed that. “Shall I give the report here?”

“Yes.” Again, not sharp, but cause for caution. He closed the door behind him, standing beneath the mantle of Dedue’s powerful shoulders as if he could shelter himself from the wind. He wore the tattered cloak of his father that he refused to allow repairs to, but the wind came from  _ within  _ the body in the cloak anyway. “Yes, I will take it here. On the porch.”

Strangely specific. “Very well,” Dedue reported, not bothering to bow lest he knock the King’s head with his chin. “The saplings on the southeast border show some promise, though they have yet to blossom. I believe it is the strictness of the wind that keeps them hidden.” Dimitri bowed his head, as if holding it up was such an effort, as if that would somehow quell the storm within him that was keeping the saplings from blooming. Dedue was not concerned. “Be patient, Your Highness,” he offered with the firmness of a beast as sure of himself as he was with the changing of night to day. “The wind will calm when you are well again.”

“Of course.” Dimitri did not believe him at all. “Perhaps,” he said, casting that single lamplike glowing eye onto the bear’s face. “I will be well again when you remember to call me by my name.”

Dedue caught himself. It was not about his desires to show him his due respect, everything was about the King’s desires and comfort, whatever would nestle his tired body and deliver him, cradled, into a stable season again. “Apologies, Dimitri.” He did not stutter when he said it. He used to falter when he used that name, but now it was easy to say, only not easy to remember. “Shall I go on?”

“Yes, go on then.”

Dedue obeyed without a moment, as though a period of silence, no matter how terse, might prove him disloyal. “The pines have decreased somewhat more than usual,” he looked up, over the King’s head, as though there was a list he was reading from, though the only list Dedue required was in his excellent memory. He paused for a moment, worried that Dimitri might take that particular item as a personal attack, and the King’s fingers did twitch against themselves as though he might do to them what he had done to the now broken doorway, but no other expression showed itself anywhere on his body. “We may need to send someone else to deter human advancement.”

“How many lost?”

Dedue looked down. “In total?”

The wrong thing to say. His fingers twitched harder. “Just to logging.”

“Ah. Nearly two hundred this winter.”  _ This  _ **natural** _ winter,  _ he neglected to say. “Almost an entire yard along the small border near the closest village. According to Hubert, they seem to be expanding northward.”

“In  _ our  _ direction?” The Beast within clawed towards Dimitri’s throat, desperate to bite through and transform. In all honesty, Dedue would take many blows to allow that to happen. Even rage was more healthy than remaining despondent, unchanging. “How dare they…”

“Your Highness,” Dedue interjected before he caught himself. Dimitri was too incensed to notice. “I am happy to go myself. I will defend your forests and your beasts with my life.”

That was what jarred the King back into Dimitri. He placed his freezing hand on Dedue’s arm. Where warmth and cold met, kissed together, there was an odd little steam, a burn of mist. “No, my friend. You are too important to me. I will go.”

Despite the pleasure of his King’s touch, Dedue could not enjoy it. “Your--Dimitri, that is what having loyal subjects is for,” he pleaded with him. “You have many powerful beasts at your command, who are only too willing to--”

“--to sacrifice themselves for my failings, yes, I know,” Dimitri turned away, back to the door that Dedue would need to fix. “I won’t allow it. Will you disobey?”

Dedue considered it, as he had many times before. This was a trap for himself, and while no punishment would ever come down on his head from his King, it punished Dedue within to think of causing grief to Dimitri, who was already so grieving that he had brought down more than a hundred pines in the last five winters alone to cope with the cold that was his nature. “I will not,” he settled, knowing any human, even a hundred of them, would be hard-pressed to manage to inflict harm on His Majesty, no matter which form he chose. “But I would plead that you take Edelgard with you.” Her form was the nightmare to man that kept them awake at night, fearing blackbirds and whispering of curses, all while they longed to caress the white of her hair, the black of her wing. As many times before, she could scare them off with that striking shriek before a blow was even struck, chasing them away and plucking a few of them for her meal to keep them away… at least until the next generation of man ignored the heedings of their ancestors.

Dimitri’s smile was not bright and mysterious like Claude’s. It was all too revealing, and it was not tilted upwards enough to balance anything upon, let alone a fragile teacup. “She would follow me even if I forbade it,” he chuckled, and yet more cold seeped through the bars of its cage, his teeth, flat or sharp, unable to contain the howling of the ice within. “I must rest.”

“Dimitri, the report…” Dedue asked, not to press him, only to remind him if the case was that he had forgotten, like he had forgotten so many things before.

“Edelgard will take it. Or Hubert, I am sure,” he called over his shoulder, and returned to the emptiness of his castle where he had hidden a secret even from Dedue, whom he had never hidden a secret from before. Leaning against the creaking door as still as a doorstop, he waited for the gentle beast to leave his porch and trundle off into the snow, denied his daily company with his King. Dimitri, of course, was sorry, but not as sorry as he would have been if Dedue discovered Claude and killed him.

“He seems pleasant,” Claude piped up from beneath the many coarse blankets of the King’s nest, warmed by the fire that was sputtering, straining against the stone wall of Dimitri’s power, which bore no weakness of mortar cracks.

“I thought I told you to hide.” Indeed, it was possible he had not. He could not hold onto even a familiar melody these days, so a command to a human being didn’t even seem alarming enough to stick out to him. Dimitri lumbered past the nest which had now been claimed by another. He almost wished he could say that he minded. He did not.

“You did.” Claude burrowed deeper into the blankets. The winter was not his home; he didn’t have the fur for it, but that’s what blankets were for. “Before you came in, I was under the table.”

Dimitri smiled and Claude caught a glimpse of it, of true sunlight in it. Not that Dimitri noticed himself if his breath warmed towards a summer persuasion. It had to be unseen by him to exist, or he’d quell it with the ferocity of his self-loathing. “You were not,” he accused, pressing the wooden plate into the basin of his sink, pouring snowmelt over it before he took up a bar of soap that dear Mercedes had made for him. The sweet spirit was always making things, always crafting the world under the spindle of her careful fingertips, even when she howled to humans, a harbinger of death. How was it that she was more alive than he? Somehow, though the soap was made from the ash of fires and the fat of beasts, it brought a wafting of flowers into a place where no flowers could hope to blossom. “I would have heard you move.” He considered that this was the first time he had washed anything by himself in decades. Dedue would have done it if he’d been allowed in; Dimitri usually did not have the energy to do anything but chop firewood and sulk. Even Felix brought him his meals (all the while complaining that surely the King of Beasts could do it himself).

“Over that blizzard, how would you?” Claude gestured to the windows that might as well have been as wooden as the surrounding wall for all they displayed. He didn’t deny that Dimitri was right, though. “Listen, it’s cold and I’m not getting out of this bed until I have to.”

Dimitri hummed to himself, being careful to pick the plate clean. “It’s been a long time since anyone referred to that pile as a bed.”

“What do you call it?”

_ A bed of course,  _ Dimitri lied to himself, temporarily forgetting that he looked like a man to Claude. Still, he saw no harm in the truth here; Claude may even find it amusing. He turned, the wet plate braced against a petite wooden rack as he reached for another. “A nest, of course. Would you care for eggs?”

“Eggs?” Claude only now seemed tempted to leave the nest. “Where did you get those out here?”

“There  _ are  _ birds here, Claude.”

_ Yes, but I take some exception if those eggs belong to some great winter harpy rather than the common chicken.  _ “Giant birds.”

“True enough. But there are some normal ones too.” He didn’t think that sounded weird, but then, he wasn’t schooling his language into anything in particular. He did not feel  _ such  _ a need to be careful around Claude. He likely would not survive his winter. At that thought, his hand slipped over the small oven. He was lucky it was not yet switched on, or his castle might have been no more and neither might have Claude been.

Claude had sat up again and edged to the precarious brink of the nest where his goosebumped flesh might remember winter again. “Why don’t you cook on the fire? It’s already lit. You don’t need to waste more wood.”

_ Waste.  _ So Felix said to his face and everyone else behind the broad of his back as though he could not hear. Well, given that he never responded to the whispers, perhaps they thought that he couldn’t after all. Two hundred pines and who knew how many protective thorns the humans had chopped through, not even uprooting them to make room for more growth, and how many had  _ he himself  _ burned? It was waste enough, he knew, he  _ knew,  _ but these hands could not stop, his axe was weary, still he chopped like a man. Like a man, he stole the forest shelter for his beasts bit by bit. Stole their food, stole their homes, stole their hope as any wicked King might plan. It was not planned, it was not, and yet he couldn’t stop, he couldn’t stop,  _ he couldn’t- _

“Stop.”

Dimitri jerked his chin as his fingers almost passed through the bluish blush of the flame beneath the stove. How did the human get so close to him without him noticing? Perhaps Claude may have hidden beneath the table before, how would he know? How would he know anything? The warmth of the man’s small hand eclipsed even his breath, making him hot for the first time since the cusp of his youth when he’d hide beneath the furs of his father’s coat.

“Let me?”

Dimitri let go of the pan, and Claude reached for the little dial Dedue had so lovingly smithed to the shape of a lion’s face. Claude was not afraid to grasp the lion, leaning over Dimitri’s shoulder as the beast crouched on the floor as though he were some divinity, stretching down from the heavy canopy of the clouded heavens to remind him of himself. He switched off the oven and made for the fire that leapt and licked towards him like the flames of hell.

Dimitri was breathing too hard to tell him to wait, to stop, that no human could possibly reach into that untamed fire for something as mundane as cooking. It was not for cooking. It was his family. It was the only reminder of his pack long gone. As their bodies fed the earth, so too did the earth feed the trees that now burned within his hearth, a fire that had died the moment Claude arrived. And even in resurrection, was it the same? If every branch, every ember had been replaced since that first time Dedue lit the fire for him, was it the same fire? Or was this one made by Claude and subservient? Was it  _ not  _ his family?

The sudden crackle of yolks in the beaten pan wrenched him from that misery again. How many times had Claude himself, merely by standing, speaking, reminded him of the space of his body? How many times in little more than thirteen witching hours…

“See? I can cook for myself, no need to worry.” The fire continued to leap and devour, and yet not a lick of it burned the copper of his being. “Do you want any?” One-handed, he cracked another egg, nearly the size of his fist, over the rim of metal that shielded them from the shrieking fire of Dimitri’s dead clan. With such ease he performed the mundane that Dimitri could not.

“How are you doing that?” he asked instead, still crouching by the stove, now cold.

“You just have to be quick when you crack them, so the runny part doesn’t get everywhere.” As if he was asking about cooking eggs instead of answering Dimitri’s question of  _ how can you possibly stand there and exist when I have stood there for so long in obscurity?  _ Well, maybe he  _ was  _ asking him about cooking. Was cooking, the act of feeding, not existing for a beast? Or at least preparing? Even Felix liked to smoke what he caught rather than eat it raw, though Edelgard feasted on her humans freshly and Dedue partook of the fish as soon as they unwittingly leapt from the river and into his maw.

Dimitri sat back, looking so small there on the floor, cradling his headache as though he were trying to limit its damage to his head only. He laughed again for the third time in as many hours as he understood that Claude existed. Not that he understood it at all. “You are  _ amazing.” _

“I know.” Claude turned, offering the pan, warmed by the love of a family Dimitri longed for, that they might nourish them both. “Plate them for me?”

Claude ate, but he never ate in silence, even when his tongue was otherwise preoccupied by chewing. He hummed and mused and even when those were absent, he stared at Dimitri with such volume that surely anyone might be unnerved and long for the quiet again. But not Dimitri. The quiet was his enemy, the enemy he knew, the enemy he sat with and spoke with while it slowly drank its fill of his blood until he was empty and had nothing more to give.

“I hope these eggs…” Claude put down the fork. “This meal doesn’t deplete your larders, does it?”

Dimitri blinked. “No more so than eating alone.”

“You’d eat six eggs alone?”

“Is that strange?”

Claude laughed and the fire he’d touched seemed to flicker and roar, climbing higher in the soot-soaked chimney stones. “Not for someone of your size, Dimitri.” He put his elbow on the table and his chin on his hand, leaning close, taking up the space that Dimitri was used to having as an uninvaded shield around him. He didn’t even realize he’d leaned away until he nearly tipped over his chair. “What’s wrong? Scared of little old me?” Claude’s wink seemed to close a window shade on half of the light in the castle, in all the world.

“Of course not.”  _ Yes. Entirely. _

“Liar,” Claude teased, that balancing smile so soft on him this time, letting his fingertips brush hot over Dimitri’s forearm, exposed when he folded up his sleeve to use the stove.

Dimitri stood up and this time the chair  _ did  _ topple. He didn’t pick it up. “I should get more firewood.”

Claude did not lean back into what space Dimitri had given him leave for. If anything, he seemed to grow closer, larger, taking in the size of the Beast and not turning around in fright or unease. “I’ll come with you.”

“No.” Dimitri swallowed, but his mouth was so dry there was nothing but sandpaper to the motion. “The beasts will devour you if the pines don’t.”

Claude sat up properly, letting Dimitri breathe again. He stole a glance at the not-window where wood was piled yet so high. “Surely you’re not going that far.”

“You can still find beasts who come right up to the door but they cannot get inside.” Or rather,  _ they wouldn’t dare.  _ There was something nice and lonely about that.

“You would protect me.”

So certain.  _ What do you know?  _ Dimitri longed to cry, so desperate for what knowledge this man held that he could not grasp. Why did Claude  _ trust  _ him? He really shouldn’t. He shouldn’t be here. He should leave. But how, without Edelgard descending on him from above? How without Felix falling upon him and picking his bones clean to smoke the rest of him? And what would they say if Claude braced under the protection of Dimitri’s word? What King of the past would shelter the humans who would kill them as soon as see them?

“I’d rather not have to,” was all he could gasp out before he rushed out into the world. Rushed into the place he normally hid from just to escape the enigmas that he didn’t know how to pick apart.

Claude frowned, sitting back and staring at the closed door, waiting for him to return. That was all he could do. He had nothing here, he’d spent every bit of mortal trappings and belongings just to be in the presence of the King of Beasts and yet the King was afraid to get close. He peered down at himself. He knew he was a handsome creature, even like this, in these forms that Dimitri was not used to. Handsome curls, brown as the richest coffees, his hands and face like the dark sands of the dunes to the south. Even his eyes were brighter than the pines that jutted out from the muting snow. But it was more than beauty that he needed. He had spent years to get here, he was  _ impatient,  _ and he knew the King had spent years upon years upon  _ years  _ by himself… why would he not leap to his company?

His gaze strayed from the cold stove and then stuck on the fire, dying down now that Claude’s mood had tempered low. If the King so craved the warmth of a fire, Claude could touch him without burning. But Dimitri was afraid of him. The only thing Claude had that he knew the fire did not was the discernment of all living things. Dimitri must fear his  _ judgement. _ Perhaps, he considered with his lip caught in his teeth, he had come at Dimitri from every angle and given him only the escape of the door. It was not how Claude wanted to spend the winter of the beasts, alone and empty in a cabin as lame as a broken limb which the King would deign to call his  _ castle. _

Well, a different approach, a different angle; Claude could spend yet more years looking for it, should it come to that. He would not let the King slip through his fingers. So he forewent the idea of chasing outside after him. It was not the cold nor the storm that kept him in. He’d spent all of his patience along with his mortal comforts, so he would have to spin some more. And that would take time.

  
  



End file.
